Blog - Joy

The last few weeks have been on the whirlwindy side: A long van trip up to and back down from Alberta, Canada for several presentations there, and all of two days here at home before we schlepped on another long van trip down to and back up from Houston, Texas, where I presented to a gathering there too.

Dear OMG-ers,

I have a dear friend, up here in Two Harbors.

I was already late and well on my way to my late husband’s memorial service before I realized that the urn with his ashes still sat on the kitchen table.

For what may or may not be the umpteenth time, E and I were belting out Hamilton on our way to her confirmation class this morning.

Adjectives are the unsung heros of nouns.

“Then Herod secretly called for the wise men and learned from them the exact time when the star had appeared. Then he sent them to Bethlehem, saying, “Go and search diligently for the child; and when you have found him, bring me word so that I may also go and pay him homage.”
So, tells Matthew in 2:7-8, said King Herod to the wise men after learning from them that the king of the Jews had been born.

This morning, I found myself trolling some earlier blogs I wrote about Advent and Christmas, trying to remember what thoughts I have had about them in the past (I have lots of thoughts, but can hold on to only one or two at a time).

Below are photos from my home office (I’ve discovered that you can see them a bit more clearly if you click on them.)

It’s been a rough couple of weeks, to be sure, in the news here and abroad.

Ten years ago yesterday, all was mostly well in my world.

So tomorrow, on Ash Wednesday, many–not all, but many–people in the Christian Church mark the beginning of Lent.

Appropriately, I think, I tend to keep personal updates off of my OMG Facebook page.

“We pray for the Holy Spirit to come, and then, when she does, we want her to go home!”

Within days, our eyes and ears and minds and hearts have drawn in far too much smoke and fire and blood and weeping.

We have been waiting for weeks now to sing that very first verse: “Joy to the world, the Lord is come!”

So rumor had it, when I was young and svelte, that when a person ages, their metabolism slows down, and they gain weight more easily, and it takes a lot longer to work it off.

So tonight I learned that the tradition of paper advent calendars with windows that open to chocolate, or, for the more pious of us, Bible verses, started in Germany in the early 1900s.

“How is the Holy Spirit found in everyday life?”

In December, 1967, John Updike was writing “Talk of the Town” for the New Yorker, and he spent most of that “Talk of the Town” column talking about the “Umbrella Man.”  He said that his learning about the existence of the Umbrella Man made him speculate that in historical research, there may be a dimension similar to the quantum dimension in physical reality.  If you put any event under a microscope, you will find a whole dimension of completely weird, incredible things going on.  It’s as if there’s the macro level of historical research, where things sort of obey natural laws and usual things happen and unusual things don’t happen, and then there’s other level where everything is really weird.
My father sends me an awful lot of good stuff for blog ponderings.  Far too long ago, he sent me a link to a New York Times video about the Umbrella Man.  It’s a short film by Errol Morris, an interview with Josiah “Tink” Thompson, quoted above.  He’s an academic-become-gumshoe, and while not all people agree with his methods or his madness, he raises curious questions, and I like people who raise curious questions.